


Dude can you just like touch my face or something

by TalkingAnimals



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Meteorstuck, Quadrant Confusion, Retcon Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 19:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4889089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TalkingAnimals/pseuds/TalkingAnimals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve gotten closer. You know you have, because he’s sitting closer and staying longer and you can feel the quick glances you steal when he’s not looking being returned to you in kind. You can tell Something Is Going On, something you might try to assign into a quadrant with another troll, but that’s the problem.</p><p>He’s not another troll.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dude can you just like touch my face or something

*

You watch him react to his feelings of hostility towards others in the most alien way. You listen to him talk about his friends and disconnect all his feelings from concepts of romance. And the worst part is, you have to listen to him talk about relationships with men and women, as if they were completely different things.

You have to watch him gesticulate angrily and he tries to talk about the distinction between male friendship and male romance, as if those were any different, either. You have to see his shoulders heave up as he starts a tirade that never, never explains to you what he’s really trying to say, and he always starts them after you’re sure, so sure, that the two of you have gotten closer.

He doesn’t flinch away when you touch him any more, to the point where you’ll spend hours together, your sides so close together you can feel the bumps of his ribcage. You’ll lay an arm just slightly over his, and after many, many, many repetitions, you finally stopped sensing a change in his posture when you’d shift it. But it doesn’t last.

When he gets up, he doesn’t come back down for days.

You remember the two of you sitting next to each other, arms overlapped, watching Dane Cook movies on repeat, his eyes glazing over while you talked about the emotional intricacies of yet another relatable troll film (you can relate almost any troll film to this Dane Cook movie, it’s a masterpiece). Your hands flying up into the air, borderline screaming about the fact that most of Dane’s problems in this scene could be solved by a good auspistsice, not realizing he was peeking at you from behind his glasses. Finished with your tirade, you threw your hands back down, one of them falling back onto his while you were too distracted to meticulously organize around his boundary issues.

You left your hand there, not wanting to adjust for him after being so worked up, not wanting to have to make yourself uncomfortable for his sake when you’d just fucking riled yourself up, again.

Your hand stays, he doesn’t.

He’s up as fast as the hand had dropped, and not only is he out the door, he’s gone for a week. Where he goes you have no idea, because you can’t find him anywhere on the meteor when you wander around in the next few days, more or less unoccupied without his presence. He has a room that he’s likely staying in, sure, but to stay in there so long without anyone else on the meteor being able to find him, it seems…

It seems like it’s saying something.

Something to you.

“Hey.”

You look up, hoofbeast-in-the-glow-spheres look plastered accross your face. You finished the movie you were re-re-re-watching over an hour ago, and had no idea you’d been zoning out on the title screen for that long until he interrupted you.

“Shitty Dane Cook movies again? Holy shit, I thought I was never gonna watch one of these again.” It’s a similar joke to one he makes every time you get together to watch them, and he sits down beside you with ease. You have no idea how he manages to continue being so fucking unflappable all the time. He settles in to watching it like he isn’t being the most frustrating person to ever exist, not that you have a huge frame of reference for that as far as humans are concerned.

You lapse into the comfortable routine of sitting through the movie with him, and you both slowly establish the close proximity that’s characteristic of these movie re-run nights. By the time you’re at the second act, he’s got his head against your arm, forearms only slightly touching, the most immediate contact two people can have without it “meaning” something, apparently.

You can’t take it for another fucking second.

“Dave,”

His head shifts off your shoulder quickly, the small motion adding fuel to the fire as you ask,

“I need to fucking know, are you,”

A sharp inhale on your part as you muster up the resolve to plough through the question,

“Are you, like John, also "Not A Homosexual”, is that like, A Thing on your planet, a widespread thing, that’s like an epidemic of arbitrary nonsense, uh,“

You catch yourself as soon as you see him shoot up from your arm and gawk at you. His cheeks and the tops of his ears are bright red, and he’s sitting up as stiff as a board.

"Dude, what? That’s not only, literally the corniest way to talk about that, and such a fucking weird alien thing to ask–”

“Because I fucking like you, Strider. You get that, right?” You stare him down and he visibly jumps at your question. He directs his eyes anywhere but at you and you see him lower back down and away from you.

“Like,” You continue, 

“I’m fine with people not liking me because of me, I’m actually pretty used to it,”

You didn’t know it at the time, but he looked up at you when you said this, eyebrows flying skyward and mouth tightening up,

“But this confuses me. To not be liked in this weird and arbitrary way. I can’t actually parse how human romantic relations function when I don’t understand this part of it. I…” You can feel yourself fidgeting despite your best intentions, your voice raising slightly as you fail to quel your nerves. You don’t want to look at him.

“Dave, I don’t know how to know what’s going on here.”

You steal a glance back at him and see that he’s fidgeting, avoiding eye contact while fiddling with the fingers on one hand with those from the other. He was slowly taking in air while twitching around, and finally exhales it all in one massive breath.

“I don’t either, man.” He confesses, cracking his knuckles, braiding his fingers together, focusing on anything but the fact that he’s actually having this conversation with you. It’s the conversational equivalent of a noncommital shrug.

You shove his arm a bit, frustrated that he won’t even look at you.

“Bull! Fucking! Shit, Strider!” You puntuate. You shocked him enough to stop his hands, his face finally turned back to you, his eyebrows visible above his oversized glasses.

“If you didn’t have ANY IDEA, what you FUCKING WANTED,” it’s impossible to keep a grip on your volume control at this point. You’re too angry.

“WHY WOULDN’T YOU FUCKING LEAVE ME OUT OF IT?”

Oh, good, you’re crying.

“Oh my god. Dude. Uh,” You caught him completely off guard, apparently, and his arms are up by his ears, his entire posture clearly dictated by the activation of his human fight-or-flight instinct. You have no idea which one he’s predated for and, really, can’t be bothered to care, with how fucking terrifed you are. It’s not fun being reduced to tears over something like this on an average day, but the need to keep your bodily fluids to yourself for your own safety is something you haven’t unwired from yourself yet. You can feel the warm red tears falling down your face, and your compulsion to cover them up is dicated in equal parts by shame and an actual, immediate fear of death. He puts both his arms on the one of yours not currently on tear duty.

“Karkat, dude,” If you weren’t so fucking riled up you might appreciate his total loss of cool and actual initiation of physical contact, but, as it turns out, you are so fucking riled up.

“SHOVE OFF, STRIDER.” You yell, volume control at an absolute minimum and agitated flailing at an absolute maximum. While one arm is busy rubbing itself on your face in an attempt to remove any offending pink tears, the other is flying around in an unsuccessful attempt to de-Strider itself.

“We can talk about it, if it’s going to calm you down, man.” He finally gasps out, his arms tugging down on your sleeve, “You and me just bought a supersized fucking convo combo, hold the unquestionably shitty puns that would inevitably come with the meal on any other day.”

He looks down, hands still attached to your sleeve, the force of his pull starting to be more noticable as you begin to calm down.

“And, uh, hold any criticism of that actually pretty shitty pun itself, I’m kind of operating under some pressure here. Maybe I could have made, like, a one-way ticket to convosville joke instead. No, that sucks, too.”

His grip on your shirt gives slightly, just as your patience with him does the same.

“STRIDER.” You’re still not nearly calm enough to be speaking in anything resembling an indoor speaking voice, and he looks back up from his extremely loud internal monologue in response.

“Sorry,” He coughs,

“We can, uh, actually have the conversation instead of, like, you know, me clearly stalling with probably the least funny and most inappropriately timed series of jokes in all of human history. Which I know because I totally just zipped through all of time to check it out. Zip.” He clears his throat, looking at you over the tops of his glasses, glancing away for a moment when he catches your still-heated stare. He finally releases his hands and asks,

“‘Sup?”

You’re immediately infuriated by how calm and fucking COOL he’s trying to be during this whole thing, and you try to avoid doubly frustrating yourself by thinking about how he very likely wouldn’t understand the romantic ramifications of that infuriation. You just glare up at him, lip curled up and baring your teeth even more than usual, and ask, “OKAY, STRIDER, SO,”

You clear your throat, trying to get a slightly more reasonable grip on your volume,

“What the fuck actually IS going on here?”

More fidgiting and breaking of eye contact, but it at least seems like he’s trying to contain it somewhat.

“I don’t know, man.”

He catches your reaction, as your shoulders and arms prepare to skyrocket, and puts a hand up.

“No, listen, man, hear me out. This isn’t easy for me, in any fucking concept you might have of any fucking quadrant or even without quadrants, before quadrants are even put into the picture. It’s about a lot more than that, and, yeah, it does have to do with,”

He pauses, looking around and rubbing a hand over his hair,

“Okay, I mean, we’re going to have to delve into the some more appropriate shorthands for it instead of just discussing "human homosexuality” but,“

He pulls his eyes forward for long enough to finish an entire statement this time,

"It has a fucking lot to do with that.”

Eyes and body turning back away, twitch, fidget, flex, but it’s obvious he’s having trouble operating any other way,

“I mean, this isn’t something I really had to consider on earth, like, ever. Any concept I had of myself was so fucking removed from any actual reality. When you’re stranded by yourself with a shitty, absent guardian for your entire life, you have no one to fucking bounce yourself off of, except him and his shitty puppets and your not-really-real-enough-to-count friends. And it’s easy to take this icon of yourself, this idea, based on shit everyone told you was cool, this shit the most important perso–”

Fidget,

“–People in your life told you was cool, and everything that wasn’t cool just has to be Another Thing. And in most cases, that thing sucks. In a lot of cases you actively try to be, like, not that thing. That thing fucking sucks. Everything that has to do with you being worth anything is intrinsically tied up in you NOT BEING THAT FUCKING THING.”

You would usually resist the urge to put your hand on his arm in a case like this, but with the amount of energy in the room it finds its way there despite your better laid plans. To your surprise he grabs it, squeezing your hand with an alarming amount of force.

“It sucks, dude. It fucking completely sucks.”

He’s squeezing your hand to the point that it’s painful, and you can’t even try to care.

“Trying to navigate this shit, and then, trying to navigate this, like,”

He quickly releases your hand and gestures wildly with both of his,

“Fucking alien friendship shit! It’s so hard to even come to terms with being this close with a fucking bro even at a normal bro level and then to deal with the fact that this shit apparently has to be fucking romantic to you inherently! Do you know how hard it is to think about that being part of the fucking equation when you’re told you can’t even sit next to your friends too close or you’re fucking gross, man!”

You open your mouth to speak and he yells over you immediately,

“NO! YOU FUCKING DON’T! Because I see how you look when I try to explain this shit to you, man. When I try to fucking talk about earth and all the fucking shit that’s normal there and fucking made to be normal there. The shit I fucking grew up with and you know nothing about! For someone who seems to give such a shit about romance, you find a lot of convenient fucking ways to not care about it when I try to talk about it.”

He throws his hands back down by his side and glares at you. You hold his eyes but find yourself needing to squirm even under a glare from behind a pair of glasses.

“…I’M SORRY,” You assert in the most comically inappropriate volume possible.

“I DIDN’T ACTUALLY, UH, KNOW, THAT’S WHAT THOSE WERE ABOUT, DAVE. I KIND OF FEEL, LIKE, A GIANT ASSHOLE HERE RIGHT NOW.”

You also kind of feel, like, maybe you shouldn’t be yelling, but that doesn’t stop you from staying agitated enough to continue,

“I KIND OF JUST THOUGHT, YOU WERE TRYING TO REJECT ANY IDEA OF ANY QUADRANTS BEING FILLED BETWEEN US, WHICH WAS REALLY CONFUSING WHEN, UH,”

You hesistate for a moment before you slowly scoot yourself closer to him, putting your arm over his and pressing your side against him in your usual arrangement,

“WHEN THIS IS WHAT KEEPS HAPPENING BETWEEN US. AND WHEN YOU KIND OF, UM,”

You swallow, trying to get as good of a grip on your volume as possible to explain yourself,

“WHEN YOU, when you uh. Wouldn’t really try to stop it. And would KEEP, UH, KIND OF AdVANCing it?” Your voice hitches and cracks in your throat as your nerves continue to get the better of you.

His eyes move to you, to the floor, and then his whole head turns away from you. He keeps your proximity, though, and you can feel him lean into you slightly as he looks away.

“…Yeah. I know.” He lets out a breath and leans down as he admits it, resting his face on his hand.

“I know, man, and I know I’m probably, like, a hugely cumbersome asshole to try and get to know, but, like,” He sneaks a glance at you, which you catch easily because you’ve openly been starting at him,

“I’m not doing it on purpose, okay?” He hesitates, before clumsily pushing his hand under yours, wrapping his fingers into your own. You bristle.

“Dave–”

“Listen, man.” He finally meets your eyes, or, at least, his head turns in a way that indicates that’s probably what’s going on. Why does he have to wear those fucking glasses all the time?

“I’m not…trying to fuck with you here, okay? I guess maybe you can’t "get” why this is hard in the most immediate sense, dude, but, just trust me, okay? It is. I’m just,“

Fidget, break eye contact, and he loosens his grip on your hand for a new twist on an old nervous habit. Without thinking, you squeeze his hand back to make up for this loss.

"Maybe I’m thinking that…I’m not like John. Like I’m not like a lot of things and people I thought I was before I started playing this fucking game. Like maybe shit’s all flip-turned upside-down and, uh, okay I’m not actually gonna be able to run with this joke at all, I’m sorry,”

You have no idea why he thought you would care about that,

“So yeah, it looks like, the answer to your question is, uh. Man can you just, like, put your hands on my face or something instead of this.”

“Uh–”

“Wait, shit, okay, in a desperate attempt to not talk about potentially being gay I just decided to go and say something outta control fucking gay instead, too bad Rose isn’t here to dissect the Freudian implications of THAT one right, okay so we can just totally ignore–”

He stops when he feels your fingertips on the side of his cheek, exhaling as he feels them slide past his sideburns, your palm resting on his face.

“Sorry, man, this is so fucking weird–”

“It isn’t.” You insist. Looking side to side you admit,

“Well, okay, it actually completely is, but I kind of don’t fucking care at all, Strider. ” You should be tired of eye contact cat-and-mouse at this point, but you can’t actually help yourself from looking into his shitty ironic sunglasses again.

“…Cool.”

You feel him relax into your hand, and almost jump when you feel his push into the hairs on the back of you neck,

“Just, like, if I talk a lot about how completely gay this is, try to ignore me, because I’m gonna.”

“I don’t even know what that means.” You assert.

He snorts a laugh for the first time in hours.

“Trust me, dude. I fucking know.”


End file.
